Page 90 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Developing Literacy

Figure 5.1
Activity Example for
Practising Reading and
Writing the Sound /k/
(Bratož et al., 2019, p. 75)

that students are engaged and motivated. They also emphasise that literacy
teaching should build on the oral language skills and link to pupils’ back-
ground knowledge and experiences (Cloud et al., 2009).

The Phonics Approach
Thephonicsapproach focuseson letter-soundrelationsratherthan on whole
wordsrecognition.Itutilizesbottom-upprocessingskills,focusingonphone-
mic awareness. It helps children make mental connections between letters
and sounds and to form a variety of spelling patterns in English. Learners
need to be able to sound out or decode words (which involves taking the
soundsin awordapart) andthen blendthesoundstogetheragain.In aphon-
ics lesson, the usual procedure is to start with single consonants that occur
as onsets in one-syllable words (e.g. ball, bear, blue, big boy), then move to
consonants at the end of words and then to vowels. The English vowel sys-
tem is extremely complicated; a single vowel letter can be connected with
different vowel sounds, we have short and long vowel sounds, combinations
of two vowel sounds, some vowel letters are silent, etc.
While it would be counterproductive to teach all the rules explicitly, some
patterns are useful to focus on, such as the ‘Magic -e’ rule according to which
by adding ‘e’ at the end of a word, the short vowel sound changes to a long
vowel sound as in mad -made or plan -plane. Similarly, Dagarin Fojkar et al.
(2011) point out that the phonics method should be employed gradually and
systematically in developing YLs’ literacy skills. It should not be overused,
since pupils will soon realize that the phonics rules do not always apply. For
example, one sound can be related to different letters (e.g. /š/ in passion, ma-
chine, shoe, nation) and one letter to different sounds (e.g. ‘a’ in fat, fast, fate).
In Figure 5.1 you can see an example of an activity for 3rd grade pupils in
which they need to match the letters to the right picture, according to the
letter combinations that form the sound /k/ (i.e. ‘ck,’ ‘k’ or ‘c’).

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